The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Thanks for reading, watching, and special thanks to those who have taken the time and trouble to comment. I apologise to the few followers for the inactivity – it’s a lot of work to produce these interviews, and, to be honest, not proportional to the feedback received. Perhaps, when I have some time on my hands I’ll come up with more, but till then, I hope you’ll enjoy revisiting some of the gems here and a warm welcome to the new visitors who have stumbled upon this blog in one form of another.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 4,200 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 7 years to get that many views.

Once in a while someone catches me off-guard and this is one of those times. Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Worldwide Education at Microsoft, runs a personal blog, www.dailyedventures.com, where he speaks to “heroes in education worldwide”.

Each day the blog features an interview with someone in the education sector: “teachers, school leaders, policy-makers, business leaders, celebrities, NGO leaders, researchers – people who have embraced enhancing education as a core facet in their lives.” Anthony tries to find out who these people are, what inspires them, what frustrates them, and what hopes they hold for the future of education.

So, when I was contacted to participate, how can I possibly refuse, right?

I can’t believe more than three months have passed since I published the last interview (with Luke Meddings). Shame on you if you haven’t watched that yet!

Do you like using videos in the classroom? What do you do with them? Have you heard about the website Film English? Whether you have or you haven’t, here’s the interview I did with Kieran Donaghy, author of the aforementioned award-winning site. Find out what drives someone like him to produce free lesson plans, visit his site, and if you have any questions or opinions, please do write in the comments section. I’m sure Kieran will be only too pleased to answer them.

If you’ve got the bandwidth to spare, you can watch it in glorious HD! To watch in HD, click on play. You’ll then see two extra icons appearing on the bottom right of the screen. Click on the wheel icon, second from left, choose 720p. Enjoy!

Bio

Kieran Donaghy has taught in the UK, Italy, Portugal and Spain. He is a teacher and teacher trainer at UAB Idiomes Barcelona part of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has Master’s degrees in TEFL, and Business Communication.

He is particularly interested in the use of film in the classroom. He is the co-author of Cineliteracy, 10 Films for Health Professionals. He has a blog on the use of film FILM ENGLISH which has won numerous awards including Best Individual Blog in the 2011 Edublog Awards.

He has given presentations on film at national and international conferences.

This interview’s actually been a long time coming, but not only just before IATEFL Glasgow that we managed to do it. I’ve enjoyed putting it together and I hope you all will like it, too. Stay till the end – there’s a little surprise!

Bio

Luke Meddings is a teacher, author and teacher trainer. In 2000 he co-founded the Dogme in ELT movement with Scott Thornbury, and their book Teaching Unplugged (Delta Publishing, 2009) won a British Council ELTon Award for Innovation in 2010. In 2011, together with Lindsay Clandfield, he started The Round, an e-publishing collective; their e-book 52: a year of subversive activity for the ELT classroom has just been published.